“How are you feeling today?”
“How are you feeling today?” my Compaq Portable Computer asked me in bright green blocky letters against the black screen.
I then had a series of options, from “great” to “awful.” Each of these options triggered a different set of analysis questions, which, in turn, had their own sets of analysis questions. At the end, the computer offered some empathy, a bad computer pun or two, and some encouragement about the day.
It was 1983. I was 8 years old. I had painstakingly coded a start-up program in BASICA that I hoped could be a daily “therapist” program: “500 If ‘good’ goto line 1090”
I was not a kid with a lot of friends. If you were a kid with a lot of friends, you probably already know that just based on my chosen hobby. Kids with lots of friends don’t sit around pecking on the computer for hours, trying to make themselves feel better with computer programming. But there I was, creating what now I see was an early-model chatbot therapist.
Side note: I have recently made this as a text message companion called May B
I wouldn’t say I was particularly lonely. Kids are jerks at any age, but between 8 and 17, kids can be monstrous. We had some kind of book service that we could order books on some paper — thinking about it, I have a hard time comprehending how this worked… did we really just look at a catalog and fill out a form of what books we wanted? And then a month later, the books we ordered would be distributed? Is that really how it worked?— and I always opted for the Choose Your Own Adventure books, which, now that I think about it, probably primed my brain’s logic for the “if [option], then goto” of computer programming.
I would sit quietly for hours, flipping between the pulp-scented pages, investigating the could-be options that I didn’t pick. Any one decision could send the whole story branching off into a whole new direction. I wanted to know all the decisions and all the directions.
All this time, I spent alone. I wasn’t a very good student, despite being “bookish” and a loner.
In retrospect, I see why I was in therapy: my mom took me there because we had moved a bunch of times, my parents were divorced, and both had symptoms — though probably not the diagnosis — of mental health issues. It’s likely I was exhibiting the symptoms of depression.
The computer therapy boot program on my Compaq Portable was just one of many little programs I made (instead of doing my homework). I wanted to help lonely people. I wanted to help people who felt out of place. I wanted to help people who, like me, needed therapists from an early age, just to have someone to talk to.
But I never wanted to be a mental health professional, because I assumed that everyone had the same mental health issues I did. Based on the proliferation of social anxiety and depression memes on the internet, either the people on the internet are especially depressed and anxious, or everyone is depressed and anxious. My focus has always been on acknowledging the mental health issue and then steamrollering it with force of will, dragging myself through the darkness, over glass, through infernos, and just doing my best to do it anyway.
At times, I have been able to use my mental illness to my advantage, and I’m even working on a book and some talks about how to tailor one’s career around their own mental health. Years ago, I wrote a blog post about it.
“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” — Albert Einstein
In my book, I talk about “helpful philosophies.” As I have worked through my own depression issues, I have studied the very fabric of reality (there’s a lot of time for fabric-of-reality gazing when bedridden with depression).
This TED talk describes what I have come to learn about reality: there isn’t one. If depression is a debilitating condition in your life, that is your reality. If you believe in reality, depression will be a debilitating condition.
But I don’t think it has to be that way. I have lived the progression from catastrophically depressed to mostly fine, with a damn great life.
My friend shared this picture today:
This is why I’m working on this text message app. I think we can change the size of our dog. We can get better. We can get clearer about our life. We can create a life so awesome that we get perspective for those darkest times.
If I was to re-write that computer program today, I would have every sequence end with, “It’s going to get better. It only gets better.”
